Palliative and Supportive care

EGFRI-Related Skin Toxicity

Information, treatment algorithms and educational materials for healthcare professionals and patients about skin problems that may occur when being treated with anti-EGFR drugs

Multikinase Inhibitor Related Skin Toxicity

Information, treatment algorithms and educational materials for healthcare professionals and patients relating to the management of dermatological toxicities in patients treated with multikinase inhibitors.

Drug-Drug Interactions with Kinase Inhibitors

Information and education online resource for healthcare professionals on drug-drug interactions which can arise from the use of kinase inhibitors

Pembrolizumab demonstrated efficacy as second-line therapy for advanced urothelial cancer and as a possible treatment for patients with advanced mucosal melanoma

medwireNews: Pembrolizumab may extend overall survival (OS) in patients with platinum-refractory advanced urothelial cancer and shows activity against advanced mucosal melanoma, suggests research reported at the 2017 European Cancer Congress in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

“This is important because this patient population tends to be mostly elderly patients who have many other illnesses and health conditions as well”, the presenting author emphasized.

“These results support the use of pembrolizumab as the new standard of care for advanced bladder cancer.”

Positive pembrolizumab results were also reported for 84 patients with advanced mucosal melanoma who had participated in the KEYNOTE-001, -002 and -006 trials, 90% of whom had received at least one prior treatment. Seventy percent of the patients had PD-L1-positive tumours.

The ORR was 19% and the disease control rate (DCR) was 31%, with a median PFS of 2.8 months and a median OS of 11.3 months. For the 16 patients who responded to treatment, median time to response was 12.4 weeks and median duration of response was 27.6 months.

Furthermore, 39% of the patients had previously received the CTLA-4 inhibitor ipilimumab and in these patients the ORR was 15%, the DCR was 27% and median duration of response was 27.6 months.

“Our results show that patients benefited from pembrolizumab regardless of whether or not they had been pre-treated with ipilimumab”, presenting author Marcus Butler, from the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada told the press.

While noting the need for further investigation to understand why response rates were lower for mucosal melanoma than that reported for other subtypes, he added: “These findings suggest that mucosal melanoma patients should be offered immunotherapy as standard of care and not excluded.”